Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment.* The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like Darrow and scientists like Winterton Curtis found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:
The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.
That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.
Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.
... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?
Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.
His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.
...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace.
Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will. When I do, I’ll channel the spirits of Winterton Curtis and Clarence Darrow and thus won’t be at risk of losing what Meghan O’Rourke calls “the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work… the imprint of attention.”
My wife and I enjoyed the play and dinner last Saturday. It was her first trip to Dayton. I visited for the re-enactment in 2018 and 2023.I do want to reiterate a suggestion I've made before: it would be great if a future performance could expand the story a bit. If you look in John A. Farrell's biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011), p. 381, there's a remarkable anecdote about Darrow's budding friendship with one of the scientists who came to Dayton, Winterton Curtis. The latter confided in Darrow, one night after dinner in Dayton, that he'd received a terminal cancer diagnosis. He found great solace in what Darrow said to him in reply, and "thanked Darrow for sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.'"Well, he did live righteously and to a ripe old age... long enough for me to remember encountering him in my childhood, when my parents rented rooms in his home in Columbia Missouri while my dad finished his veterinary degree (1960). Curtis truly embodied the best of "the humanistic philosophy of life" he espoused in his bookCurtis published his impressions of the trial years later. Those reflections are reproduced in D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. Tompkins. He does not condescend to the fundamentalists in Dayton, and in fact seems to prefer them to H.L. Mencken's variety of cynicism.If there were some way to get the Curtis-Darrow connection into the play, it would add depth and texture and humanity to the story, and would counter a certain inaccurate caricature of humanists like Curtis and Darrow as being morally deficient.I wrote a little blog post about this...
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